Pathwwway customer retention ideas for your management team

Every business stands to benefit from their management team concentrating on, developing, and implementing persuasive customer retention ideas and strategies. Retaining clients means cutting down customer churn, or when someone cuts ties with your business. The higher your churn rate, the more your management and marketing teams must focus on raising your retention rates. Knowing what causes churn helps you prevent it before it happens. Learn more about what drives customers to leave your business below, plus get some great customer retention ideas to incorporate today.

Intriguing Customer Retention and Churn Statistics

According to customer experience surveys performed by Dimensional Research on behalf of Zendesk in 2013 that revealed interesting statistics about how customer service affects churn and customer retention rates. The research proved that 39% of consumers choose to avoid a vendor for more than two years after a bad experience. About 95% of consumers choose to make a change due to the negative experience and 85% of those consumers would warn their friends and family away from a business afterward.

Consumers do not just share their experiences by word of mouth, but over social media now as well. The surveys revealed 30% of customers tend to share their positive reviews over social media, while 63% read the negatives reviews before deciding whether or not to work with your business. Customer service plays an important role in this since 82% of buyers ceased business with a company due to poor interactions with customer care departments.

High-income households avoid a business more than the average consumer after a bad customer service experience with 79% reporting they would not shop somewhere for two years or more afterward. Women reported higher rates of avoidance, 45%, due to a negative customer care interaction, as did B2B companies at about 51%.

These statistics exemplify why focusing on customer service can help lower churn rates, since you do not have clients suffering negative experiences. Check out the Pathwwway customer retention ideas below to prevent churn rates from happening to your business.

The Best Customer Retention Ideas from Retention Experts

Ask for regular feedback from your customers.

Who better understands what your customers want than your customers themselves? The biggest boost to customer retention comes when you open the line of communication with your customers and encourage them to take part in the feedback process. Customers who make suggestions and see the changes put into place feel more invested in your business and, in turn, they buy more from you and share their good experience with their friends.

A great method for collecting this feedback is through a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. The survey takes a look at the loyalty and satisfaction of your customers by asking whether or not they would recommend your business to a friend or colleague on a scale from one to ten. It then usually asks the customer why they chose that particular score with reasons for giving it.

The reasoning behind the score gives a great snapshot of customer sentiment and helps you uncover further customer retention ideas since it shows where your business succeeds for certain clients and fails for others. Taking all this information into account, you can then form an actionable plan to boost retention rates and minimize churn.

Ensure your products and services have true value.

Poor-quality products and services are some of the biggest reasons a customer chooses to stop doing business with a company. No consumers want to purchase services or goods that continually let them down and disappoint them. Reliable, high-quality products and services drive customers to behave loyally since they find true value in your business.

How do you know whether or not you provide value to your customers? Obviously, if your churn rates are low and you seem to easily acquire new customers through word-of-mouth promotion, then you probably have some good customer Pathwwway retention ideas yourself.

If it seems less obvious to you or your managers, try using a product satisfaction survey to ask questions in order to get the specific answers you want. The survey reveals where your customers think your value lies along with any concerns they may have, so you can continue doing the things that work and adjust the ones that do not.

Set, meet, and measure your customer’s expectations.

Educate your customers about the value of your business’s product or services before they get on board to set the baseline expectations for all future interactions. Once you set customer expectations, your sales and customer care teams must take great care to meet them every time. These expectations motivate customers to continue using your business because they know exactly what to expect from your goods or services and your employees.

Consider a specified customer satisfaction survey to help gain insightful feedback into whether or not your business meets, fails to meet, or exceeds your client’s expectations. Examine vital aspects of your business-customer relationship, including customer support and sales interactions, onboarding, event or conference feedback, website, online checkout process for eCommerce businesses, and many others.

Focus on cultivating customer relationships.

Consumers can tell when a business only pretends to care, so cultivating an open, honest relationship with them breeds loyalty the same way it does in a personal friendship. Your brand should be focused on relationships, not sales, since loyal customers generate so much more revenue of your business than one-time shoppers. All the suggestions listed above stimulate your business’s relationship with your clients, but you can do more.

A popular, modern method of cultivating these relationships is through a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Sales managers and your customer care team can clearly keep track of all your customers and contacts, every time someone from your business interacts with the individual client, and all the other valuable information large collections of useful data can provide. A CRM system revolutionizes how your teams deal with customers and gives your business a better chance at making them happy.

Statistics do not lie. The more time dedicated to learning about what your customers want and where they find value in your products and services, the better you understand why they keep coming back. Or, perhaps, why they do not. Listening to your customers’ ever-changing wants and needs is the simplest, but most effective part of all the customer retention ideas floating around.